


boxing the compass

by widow



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Concurrent with Dishonored 2, Consensual Choking, F/F, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 22:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17692604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/widow/pseuds/widow
Summary: “You know, I’ve always wondered.” She picks up her cigarette from the ashtray by her elbow. “What The Outsider smells like.”Emily laughs, delighted.“Like the sea.”





	boxing the compass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stonestrewn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/gifts).



> Hi Stonestrewn! I’ve been a massive fan of the Dishonored universe for a very long time, but it’s been a while since I’ve dabbled in it, so thank you doubly: for such fantastic prompts and for allowing me to dip my toe again into such a rich canon.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

 

> I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue  
>  water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.  
>  I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Sometimes, you just want  
>  something so hard, you have to lie about it,  
>  so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,  
>  how real hunger has a real taste.
> 
> —  Ada Limón, _Lies About Sea Creatures_

 

_—_

 

She’s seasick for hours after boarding the _Dreadful Wale_ and leaving behind the only home she’s ever known.

The water breaks and foams against the ship’s prow; they leave against the tide and spend hours fighting the strong currents that intersect and eddy around the mouth of the Wrenhaven river. The flight through the estuary rakes watery talons along the _Wale’s_ hull, a fickle port at the best of times made possessive by an untimely departure.

Emily stands on deck, too queasy to stay below for long, her dark hair whipping in the tumult of a wind that picks up as they leave the harbour’s basin. She fixes an eye on the ever shrinking figure of Dunwall Tower. From this distance it looks squat and ungainly; a dark, hunched interloper with long arms reaching down to the sprawl of the streets below. Maybe it’s the unfamiliar list of the deck below her feet, but from this view her home seems tumorous and unwelcome. The city’s whalers see this sight on every return from long voyages: their home and above, perched, the seat of power. The Empress ensconced in enough limestone and granite to dam up the Wrenhaven many times over.

Is it the angle that sickens her so? Or the knowledge of what stalks the tower’s halls?

Meagan finds her long after Dunwall has faded to a faint smudge on the horizon. The morning has stretched long into evening. This time of year the stars are out early; already the moon is visible in the sky, a fixed crescent above—an orange rind, or a nail bed.

The captain has the grace not to comment on the dried tears, slashes of pale salt tracks across a face grimy with the soot of the harbour Emily had crawled her way through in flight.

“I’ve prepared a room below deck for you. It’s not royal chambers but—”

“Thank you,” Emily says, hoarse, unable to shed the trappings of manners drilled into her for years, even now. “I’m sure it will suit perfectly, thank you. You’ve been too kind already.” Her hands grip the railing, fingers numb in the evening chill, made worse by the frigid spray.

“Save your thanks until you see it, Your Highness.” Meagan’s voice is careful, but she stands close enough to provide a measure of body heat, welcome after hours planted still.

Emily sniffs, long and undignified, and rubs her numb fingers across the rough skin of her cheeks. When she speaks again, it’s with the voice of the Empress of the Isles. “Your hospitality won’t be forgotten.”

Meagan laughs, the solitary flutter of a magpie, alighting. “Like I said, hold off on gratitude until you see it.”

 

—

 

  
Her memories come back to her sometimes, unbidden but near-perfect, untouched by time.

The day is dreary, an offshore wind sending grey clouds skidding across the sky. The very top of Dunwall Tower is shrouded in a fine mist. When the Royal Protector arrives at the lock, he brings sunshine with him; a part in the clouds that has Daud’s mouth twisting into something unreadable, caught somewhere between disbelief and amusement. Clear skies make them easier to spot at a distance, but today they will be fast enough that it won’t much matter.  
  
Billie remembers Daud raising a closed fist, a slight stutter in the world, a total absence of sound that lasts a fraction of an instant and has her marvelling at whatever power he has bargained his way into.  
  
What comes next is a vague rush; blinking across the slate rooftops, the sound and smell of buckshot as Corvo unloads a round into one of the Whalers. Billie is the one who reaches deep into the pool of power that exists, bottomless in the cavity of her chest whenever Daud is near, and plucks Corvo out of the air, holding him in place for long enough to stop his blade from singing. Long enough for Daud to finish killing the Empress.

A world away, Meagan Foster closes a book of shipping manifests, and watches another Empress stalk the upper decks of her ship. She does not walk alone—her Royal Protector walks with her, in her long stride and sure footing—and something else prowls by her heel, nebulous and older than the topography of of the coastline.

  
A flock of seagulls wheel overhead. Their squawking sounds like her name. _Billie. Billie. Billie Lurk._ A flash of tar black feathers in the open arc of the sky above, obscuring the watery afternoon sun for an instant.  
  
Whatever walks with Emily Kaldwin, walks with them both.

 

—

 

The young Empress wades, up to her knees in frigid river water. She’s a few paces from the bank, close enough to leap to safety should any unfriendly looking fish come lurking her way. Her feet sink deep into the silt of the riverbed below with every step, the sucking of the mud between her toes keeping her apprehensive. She is not safe here, even this close to the water’s edge, her tower, and Callista’s watchful reproach.

She looks back to shore and there is her favourite doll, Mrs Pilsen, oil slick eyes burning lamplike from an expressionless porcelain face. She is watching, to see how everything unfolds. Emily can feel the expectant gaze heat the back of her neck.

Another few careful steps through the sediment. The water laps at her upper thighs now, the tug of the current stronger as she nears deeper water. And, there. Something blacker than black, the same luminous darkness as Mrs Pilsen’s eyes. Searing underwater, the afterimage burned into the back of Emily’s retinas even as she looks back to shore for affirmation of her find.

But Mrs Pilsen is gone, with no sign of the doll’s familiar, painted features. Perhaps she was never there at all, and instead rests tucked into the freshly cleaned sheets of Emily’s bed.

Around her ankles, a clump of weeds tangle and prod, encouraging. Yes, this is what she was looking for. A gift from the heart of the river, carved at the beginning of time to fit the exact curvature of her palm and lovingly placed in the mud to await her arrival.

She plunges a hand into the icy river, splashes her front with water, ruins the white lace of her romper forever and clutches onto the charm tightly.

It writhes in her grip, slick and alive with purpose and that same incandescent glow she’s seen before, until she pulls her arm free of the water. Now the charm sits still in her hand, thrumming warm under her fingertips, but no longer alive as it had been when submerged. It’s an odd construct of metal and sun bleached bone, lit from within with some kind of power. The hum of it is familiar—like a scullery maid’s lullaby from years gone by—and she feels the heat of the thing travel up her arm, along the tracery of the blood vessels that spiderweb just beneath her skin.

Then, a voice in her ear, so close she startles, and drops the bone charm back into the black, frothing water.

_I see you, Emily Kaldwin._

The mud gives way beneath her and she slips sideways, splashing into the freezing river.

She wakes up below deck on the _Wale_ , gasping. Puddled in enough sweat that for a moment she fears her dream a reality; that she was just plucked struggling from below the Wrenhaven’s surface.

A familiar dream for an unfamiliar room.

She has caught the attention of something vast, or rather it has turned its eye on her again, like it did some fifteen years ago. The thought is not comfortable, but worn, like the fit of an old pair of gloves long considered lost, found again at the back of a drawer.

 

—

 

Emily arrives at breakfast one morning with her hand wrapped tightly in a torn up scarf. Meagan thinks for a moment that she has burnt herself on one of the old pipes below deck, but as she sets a plate of poached hagfish in front of Emily, she can see the outline of The Outsider’s mark, burning black through the cloth.

“You look tired,” she says, pulling out the stool opposite Emily and taking a seat, kicking her long legs out. “I hope you’ve been able to sleep despite the noise.”

“I’ve been sleeping,” Emily replies, cutting into her breakfast daintily in search of fine fish bones. “Though I am used to quieter accommodation.”

“We’ll reach Karnaca within a few days if the wind stays with us.” Meagan fishes in her pocket for a cigarette to go with her coffee. She leans over the whale oil lamp on the table between them, lifts the glass and wrinkles her nose at the familiar buttery stink of burning fat. She catches a light on the yellow flame and replaces the glass. When she leans back, Emily has given up on her fork and is picking through her fish with her fingers. For all the years the good Empress spent perfecting her manners, it’s funny how quickly they’re tossed aside given the right—or wrong—scenario.

“What happened to your hand?” Smoke billows into the air, caught and whisked away through a nearby porthole by an errant breeze.

Her hand twitches into a fist before smoothing out. “I caught it in a door.”

The _Wale’s_ doors are almost universally metal and near a foot thick, so the lie is laughable at best. Meagan wonders how much she can claim to know without arousing suspicion. “I was only asking because it looks like The Outsider’s mark to me.”

Emily gawps, cradling her hand against her breast. “Even through the—?”

“I think once you know what the mark looks like, there’s no hiding it.”

Her eyes are dark and keen, lit by the flickering yellow fire of the lamp between them. “Where have you seen one before?”

“I’ve been around, Your Highness. I’ve seen a lot of things.”

This seems to thrill Emily. Her face splits in a smile, warm and open. It is not a smile for diplomacy. She fiddles with the knot tied at the back of her wrist, unwraps the scarf covering her hand and offers the mark up to Meagan’s closer inspection.

Meagan reaches out and takes Emily’s hand into her own. The Empress’ fingers are long and fine-boned, unmarked by evidence of manual labour. Meagan can picture them gliding over piano keys or harp strings with little effort. She concentrates her eye on the dark spot on the back of Emily’s hand, but finds her gaze sliding off to the side, like water off an oilskin. Uncovered, it’s hard to look at the mark directly.

“When did it appear?”

“Last night. I’ve been dreaming since we left Dunwall, but last night was different. Not really a dream, I don’t think.”

“Not a dream so much as a glimpse of the Void,” Meagan finds herself murmuring, as her thumb sweeps across the vein that lines the centre of Emily’s hand. With half the mark covered she’s able to look closely; it looks like a tattoo, almost.

“This place is the end of all things,” Emily rhymes off, an odd lilt to her voice, as if something else is inside, exhaling the air from her lungs like a great set of bellows. “And the beginning.”

Meagan releases her hold on Emily’s hand and sits back. There’s a kernel of blackened resentment that sits in her chest and scratches at the underside of her heart. Billie Lurk and now Meagan Foster, so close to those gifted The Outsider’s mark, but never marked herself. She had almost stopped longing to be noticed.

“You know, I’ve always wondered.” She picks up her cigarette from the ashtray by her elbow. “What The Outsider smells like.”

Emily laughs, delighted.

“Like the sea.”

 

—

 

Karnaca lives up to its nickname. The Jewel of the South languishes in a basin flanked by sharp cliffs, a vibrant port city fattened by the rich silver mines and steady trade income from across the Isles.

Emily has known about Karnaca’s wealth since even before she became Empress, but there’s a difference in reviewing the Duke’s account book  with a bored eye and seeing the excess for herself. When she returns from the labyrinth of Kirin Jindosh’s Clockwork Mansion with Anton Sokolov slung over her shoulder, she’s so shaken that she takes to her room and refuses both dinner, and breakfast the next morning. She has no stomach for it, after what she did to one of the finest minds in the world.

She’s perched on the _Wale’s_ crow’s nest as the evening sky burns around her. Meagan climbs the rigging with one hand, a bottle of rum tucked in her pocket. Emily almost feels bad; she’d ascended with The Outsider’s help, his gifts an extension of her arm now. The dreams of rats and ruin and the black tide are a small price to pay, with so much at stake.

Meagan doesn’t speak as she sits down beside Emily, squeezed so close in the tight space that the outside of their thighs press together. She hands the bottle over and stares out at the horizon dotted with the city’s brightly sparkling whale oil lamps.

Emily’s head is overfull, and she’s thankful for the burn of the dark rum as it hits the back of her throat. She’s equally thankful for Meagan’s company, present but not intrusive, comfort without judgement.

“Thank you for bringing Sokolov back,” Meagan says, the rum pitching her voice into a slightly lower register than Emily is used to. “I was starting to think I might never see the old man again.”

Emily hums, and reaches for the bottle.

“I mean it. You’ve been working miracles since we’ve arrived.” Meagan’s single eye is shining, her feet swinging in the open air beneath them, as at ease at this dizzying height as Emily, even without the safety net of otherworldly powers.

“I wouldn’t call any of it a miracle, and I never could have done any of it without your help.” She feels warm, and brave, and light-headed. Her marked hand—still swaddled in the remains of her favourite scarf—rests as easily on Meagan’s thigh as her own, palm facing up, fingers curled.

Meagan takes her wrist and pulls Emily’s long fingers before her for inspection. The bottle still moves between them, not forgotten, as she glances over the lines of Empress’ palms, the meat of her grip, and finds it wanting.

“Here,” she says, her thumb pressing into the second joint of Emily’s index finger, “your joints are weak. You haven’t had enough practice holding that fancy sword of yours properly.”

“I haven’t been—” A mouthful of rum, a sleeve dragged across Emily’s lips. The curious curve of Meagan’s mouth, encouraging. “Most of these people don’t deserve to die. I haven’t been using my sword much.”

The word ‘deserve’ almost trips her up. It sits accusatory in the salt-heavy air. She swallows, closes a hand around Meagan’s, and moves the captain’s grip to her elbow, to the sinewy join of her bicep.

“Here,” she says, “if you choke them here, like this, it’s easy. They fall over in two seconds flat.”

“Show me.”

She’s not sure if the quickening of Meagan’s breath is a trick of the light or not. A flock of gulls sets off from the starboard bow, the flutter of a hundred wings around them. Emily  pulls herself up into a low crouch, wraps an arm around Meagan’s throat and squeezes until the older woman taps out against her elbow. There’s a heartbeat of relaxation. Every muscle in Emily’s body shudders, once.

“You’re exaggerating if you think you can have people unconscious in two seconds with a grip like that.”

“Well, why don’t you teach me how it’s done?”

She hardly finishes the sentence. One instant she’s hunched over, feet planted firmly, the next she’s bowled to the floor, her spine popping as it hits the uneven deck. Meagan is straddling her midsection, her forearm tight against the underside of Emily’s jaw.

“Here,” she says, leaning over to speak into the shell of Emily’s ear. “Press on the pulse, not the windpipe.”

Emily’s head lolls back against the hardwood behind it in surprise. She stares at the orange sky as her vision starts to recede at the edges, Meagan’s choke hold tight and relentless against the long column of her throat. She’s had too much rum for an empty stomach, but it’s not just the alcohol that has her feeling hot.

_“I can tell you that for years she was a smuggler, and worse before that. She fell in with the wrong crowd many years ago in Dunwall. The things she did. She can’t forgive herself.”_

The Heart speaks, reacting to the reflexive twist of Emily’s palms as her nails scratch at the planks below her. It startles her into movement. Her hips buck up, a half-hearted effort to dislodge the older woman, but Meagan’s expectant and shifts forward with the motion, effortless. Before she knows it, both her shoulders are pinned below Meagan’s knees, her chest caged between Meagan’s thighs. She chokes out a noise, somewhere between a sigh and an embarrassingly high pitched whine. Through the rapidly lengthening tunnel of her vision, Meagan’s dark eye stares back. Her earlier smile is gone, replaced by an expression Emily can’t read.

“This is a lesson for another time,” she says finally, snatching up the mostly empty bottle of rum and corking it. She extricates herself from Emily’s spider-like limbs and stands, leaving the Empress to lie, face turned upwards to catch sight of the flock of gulls still wheeling above the ship’s deck.

She counts seven magpies among the other birds, fourteen dark wings beat against the breeze and turn towards shore.

 

—

 

It’s Sokolov that brings news of Breanna Ashworth’s role in his kidnapping and Delilah’s return to power. Billie isn’t surprised by her involvement, just wearied. She takes Emily in the skiff to Cyria Gardens, as close to the Royal Conservatory as she dares, and lies in wait in the dark for the Empress’ return.

Breanna’s name is tangled closely with thoughts of Brigmore Manor, with the coven that grew slowly within its walls; as creeping and insidious as the poisonous flowers the more green-fingered girls kept in the greenhouse.

The hounds, the rotted floorboards, the sickly-sweet scent of rotting wildflowers. Delilah’s hands, cold on her body. Breanna’s smile sharp, mouth gasping. For a short while it was the three of them, as often entwined on a musty four poster in the manor’s master bedroom as not. It was a seduction, a nasty one, but it had made her feel wanted in a way she had never known before.

Breanna was beautiful then, is likely still so. The Void confers a certain edge on those it brushes past, like how a passing gale can sweep hair into something wild and interesting. She’s always had a cold edge to her, from years of proper breeding; once upon a time Billie delighted in being the cause of some of that unravelling.

Oh, to be young again. Young, and less gullible.

It’s after midnight by the time Emily makes her way back to the skiff. Billie had wanted to catch an hour of elusive rest, but had been kept awake by her own musing. The young Empress skids down the ramp towards the dock and pulls her mask down, her face grim, eyes alight. Some of her hair has escaped from the tight coil at the nape of her neck, and hangs in disarray around her jaw.

She’s the second upper-class, dark-haired, beautiful woman that has made Billie feel this way; like every bone in her body is filled with air, like she just might snap if held the wrong way, or at all.

“Ashworth won’t be a problem anymore,” Emily says, allowing herself a grim half-smile. There is the difference between the two; where Breanna is cold, Emily is feverish. The coup lit a fuse in her that has been burning since they fled Dunwall together.

“Good,” she replies; when Emily says _not a problem anymore_ she means not dead, but no longer worth considering. To the target in question sometimes dead might be preferable, but her dedication to keeping her hands clean reminds Billie of someone else important, from a lifetime ago.

For all her rumination on the topic, Emily Kaldwin is not Breanna Ashworth, is not Jessamine Kaldwin, is not Daud, and she deserves better than silence, or lies by omission.

“Emily, there’s something else you need to know.”

 

—

 

She holds The Heart in two hands, aims her gaze at the small of Meagan’s back and squeezes it once, lovingly, careful of the barbs. Her mother’s voice rings clearly in the salty air:

_"She has secrets I will not reveal. She may tell you in time."_

Emily stops herself from rolling her eyes, but just barely. Twenty minutes of building up the courage to turn The Heart’s attention Meagan’s way and nothing but a gentle chastisement in response. On their way back from the Royal Conservatory, Meagan had spoken about falling in with Delilah and Breanna, and how for a time she had believed in their shared cause. Emily had basked briefly in the feeling of being trusted, but it had just as quickly led to more questions. It makes her feel furtive to want more; a child caught with a sweet in hand after being scolded.

“Are you alright, Lady Emily?” Aramis Stilton rounds the corner of the upper deck and pauses, his hand splayed over the ship’s rusted railings. She is supposed to be below deck preparing for her infiltration of the Duke’s palace, not skulking around the upper decks mooning over Meagan Foster’s past.

She blinks at him for a moment before replying, so deep in her own thoughts it takes a moment to remember how to formulate a response for polite company. “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you again for agreeing to help.”

“Of course.” He moves to stand beside her. The last rays of the sun paint the _Wale’s_ decks a honeyed orange, even the deep lines of Stilton’s face seem softened by the light. “Copper for your thoughts?”

She has too many thoughts to process, let alone put into words. She misses her father, entombed by old, dark magics beyond her understanding. She worries for Dunwall, the familiar streets of her home cracked and rotted from within; a corruption of the heart. She thinks about Meagan, her newly restored eye and arm, the lightness of step that was never there in the woman she knew before.

It’s a kind of visible proof of the effect she’s had on the city and its inhabitants, though not everything is solvable through meddling with The Outsider’s magic, that much is becoming more clear by the day.

“What do I need to do to help the people of Karnaca?” She asks, lacing her fingers together in front of her, every inch a diplomat.

“Knowing to ask that question is a good start.”

“Meagan told me a little about growing up on the streets, some of the terrible things that happened to her. I don’t want the same thing happening to other children.” She recalls the conversation they’d had over lunch, so clear in her mind’s eye she can still taste the jellied eels; how she blamed her loss of appetite on the meal.

“If anyone has the power to put a stop to that, it’s you.”

“I’ve seen a lot since I came here, and changed a lot, I hope.” She sighs, and smiles. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as the princess in the tower, but that doesn’t mean spending my nights running around on rooftops, does it?”

“Who’s to say there isn’t time for both? Once this is over I’ll tell you my plan for closing those dreadful mines once and for all.”

 

—

 

Billie Lurk’s heart beats staccato against the cage of her ribs, loud enough she hardly hears Anton’s greeting when she finally stumbles below deck. She told Emily everything; her name, her involvement in Jessamine’s assassination. Where there was a stone in her chest now there’s nothing, a gaping hole where the guilt had festered, torn out and left to burn up in the weak Dunwall sun.

“Emily’s gone.” Anton’s hearing is getting worse, but he still turns from his painting at the sound of her voice, and reaches arms out to steady her as she approaches.

“Have some faith Meagan, she’ll do what needs to be done.”

She shrugs off his parchment paper hands as they  move to encircle her upper arms. “I need to go into the city, and then we’re leaving for Serkonos.”

He doesn’t argue, it isn’t like him at all.

Emily’s already taken the skiff so Billie has to swim the few hundred yards from the _Dreadful Wale_ to shore. She pulls herself out of the murky shallows dripping and shivering, but warms herself with a loping run around the edge of the pier, past the large warehouses, past the open air slaughterhouses, past the ugly industrial sprawl, the large buildings long since gone silent. It’s the first time in her life she can recall no smoke coming from the chimney stacks of the canning factories.

It’s been a long time since she’s run the streets of Dunwall like this, but the city is her home for better or worse, despite the unsettling hush fallen like a thick blanket over the cobbles. She strays into Bottle Street Gang territory, then veers back towards the river. There’s a box hidden in an apartment a few streets over, abandoned since the rat plague, with the rest of her effects from her days with the Whalers stored inside.

She jogs down another alley, one that curves downwards and runs beneath the well-maintained main streets. Then she is tackled to the ground.

She spins as she falls, reels a fist back and connects with her assailant’s jaw as they both hit the ground. There’s a crack, satisfyingly loud. She rolls them both over with a vicious twist of her hips, and she is halfway to pulling a knife from her boot when she recognises Emily below her, a pair of dark eyes burning above an ornate purple scarf. She’s winded, maybe from the fall, maybe from the look in Emily’s eyes; she could fall into those eyes, and spend another fifteen years swimming in the grief behind them.

She blinks, her throat suddenly dry. Emily dissipates beneath her, black smoke pours from every patch of her exposed skin, and Billie is thrown onto her back by an otherworldly strength. _Fucking_ _Outsider_.

She really is winded now, from where her back slams against the street, and she hisses a string of curses from between clenched teeth as she struggles to rise again. The dark shadow that was Emily Kaldwin coalesces back into the shape of a girl, strides over, kneels down and grabs her by the lapels.

“Don’t say anything, I don’t want to hear it.” Emily pulls down the scarf obscuring half her face and leans in to kiss her.

(There’s a painting, almost an abstract, of Billie Lurk as a young woman, teased into existence by Delilah’s hand in Brigmore Manor. _Her Heart, I Bathed In Poison._ The portrait had made Billie’s head ache somewhere behind the eyes, even while she had sat to model for it.

Is this what Delilah felt upon its completion?

Either way, she is starting to think there are no relationships for her that don’t involve this, a kiss in the same minute as a closed fist.)

Billie kisses her back, not out of pity, but because of wanting. Emily kisses like a court secret, fast moving with a light touch; she makes the feeling of teeth breaking the skin of Billie’s bottom lip feel dignified—like they aren’t lying in the mud in an alley, once friends and now something else, something closer yet far further apart.

A former assassin and an empress. They were never going to be parallel lines, but a brief intersection doesn’t describe it either.

Emily’s hands don’t move from Billie’s collar, fisted so tight the knuckles show through bone white, but it’s her that pulls away, and it’s her that sucks a shuddering breath through her teeth like she can’t believe what she’s doing. “I hope the wind carries you far away from here, Billie Lurk.”

Billie inclines her head, though she isn’t sure if Emily means far from Dunwall, or far from her. When she’s Empress again, maybe the difference will cease to exist. “Take back what’s yours Emily, but don’t you forget what you saw in Karnaca. I won’t forget either.”

Emily stands, and pulls Billie up by a hand. When they stand side by side they’re almost the same height, it’d be too easy to reach out, catch Emily’s hand and turn it over in her own one last time.

Before she has the chance Emily pulls her scarf over her face and turns. She breaks into a run down the alley and _reaches,_ her arm extending into a tangible black smog that latches onto a windowsill and launches her skywards. Billie stands and watches her, until she rounds a corner and vanishes out of sight, towards the long shadow of Dunwall Tower and Delilah, waiting within.

 

—

 

When Emily opens her eyes the night sky is pricked, not with stars but with holes, tiny wounds in an otherwise beautiful view. She’s flat on her back, but whatever surface lies below her shifts, like the roiling heave of a large animal in motion.

“How does it feel?” An indefinite image in her periphery. When she sits up to look around The Outsider coalesces into being; his eyes, dark as the tears in the sky above, bore a hole into the side of her skull.

“Unsteady,” she says and sure enough when she looks down, she is sitting on the back of a great whale, the expanse of its pitted grey flesh stretching out in all directions around her.

“You have an empire in turmoil under your feet. You didn’t think it would be like nothing happened? Or maybe this is less about what you’ve gained, and more about what you’ve lost.”

She doesn’t want to dignify the leading question with a response, gets to her feet slowly, testing her grip on the gently undulating surface. She begins walking towards the whale’s head, her eyes fixed on the distant blowhole to save herself from feeling dizzy. “I have my father and my empire back, I don’t know what you think I’ve lost.”

The Outsider seems bored by her response, where before he kept even pace by her right side, now he strides ahead, face turned away.

“Are you leaving me now?” She calls out as his figure pulls ahead. “You’ve been watching since before all of this started, haven’t you?”

His lead on her stretches, and when he reaches the whale’s blowhole he steps in without breaking stride and vanishes into the darkness. She jogs the last few feet over to the hole, her arms outstretched for balance as the whale lists like a large ship caught in a gale. Emily kneels at the edge of the darkness and peers in. She expects a putrid waft of ocean smell, but there’s no stench; it’s nothing like the various textbooks on the subject she pored over as a young girl, but this void creature is nothing like the whales that swim in the oceans around Gristol and Tyvia.

“I’ll watch as long as there’s something interesting to see.” His voice snakes into her ear from somewhere far away, like hearing waves crash from inside the curve of a shell. “But there are things happening across your empire that are a lot more exciting than policy debates.”

“Such as?”

“Hound fights, poisonings, scullery maids falling in love. There’s an assassin on a ship bound for Karnaca, looking for an old knife.”

She hardly dares to breathe. “Will she find it?”

“That depends on how many obstacles you plan on putting in her way, Your Majesty.”

The gaping darkness of the blowhole blinks up at her, a dark eye pointed heavenward.

Emily wakes slumped across the desk in her office, face pressed to loose sheets of paper, her pen still in her hand. It’s a familiar scene; since coming back to power there’s been no shortage of problems for her to untangle.

She runs a hand through her hair, pulling it out of its tight topknot, and glances down at the arrest warrant she’d fallen asleep while writing. It crumples under her hand easily, and when she tosses it into the fire, there’s something darkly satisfying in watching Billie Lurk’s features peer out at her from the hearth as the flame catches.

**Author's Note:**

> "Boxing the compass" is a nautical term, which means to recite all 32 points of the compass clockwise from north, but is also a name given to a wind that is constantly shifting.


End file.
